Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Back when I listened to the radio, I would often switch from radio to cassette tape when a particularly obnoxious ad came on. Once I switched to cassette, I left it on cassette for the rest of the drive.

Back when I watched television, I rarely left the room as soon as the ads came on. I left the room when an uninteresting ad came on. Then I’d come back a couple of minutes later to finish watching the show.

Today, I very rarely block ad servers; I only do so when a particularly obnoxious ad appears on my browser window. I’m lazy and cheap. I don’t even own ad-blocking software, which is part of why I rarely block: I have to go into my router settings and add the domain to the list of disallowed hosts. I don’t like going there because I’m lazy; but for the same reason, once I add an adserver to that list, it stays in that list.

I didn’t turn off the radio because I wanted to turn off the radio, and I don’t block ad sites because I want to block ads. I’m blocking a particular ad. Don’t run that ad, and I won’t block your ads. I love ads. I used to buy magazines such as 73, 80-Micro, Dragon, Rainbow, and even Omni, as much for the ads as for the content. I even loved the weirdo ads in Sheet Music Magazine. Back in the late nineties, there was a web site devoted to cool ads which I visited regularly.¹ That’s where I first saw the tda advertising & design ad. I enjoyed it so much I still show it off whenever the opportunity arises.²

The Macalope reminds us why he’s in the blogroll:

“Adobe would like to portray Flash as some noble gift that it has graciously bestowed upon the world, leading to a utopia of ubiquitous porn clips, time-wasting tower defense games, and artsy web sites where you can’t link to anything specific.”

Executive Summary: Adobe’s complaining that Apple isn’t talking enough to give their competitors an idea of what they’re making and how they’re making it. Because Apple’s very public “make useful things people love to use” mantra is confusing and hard for lumbering behemoths to understand. It really does often seem as though companies—including Adobe—think that they deserve customers, and not that their customers deserve good products. Any one of Apple’s competitors could take a big bite out of Apple tomorrow if they just took that to heart.

“The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.”

“Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the ‘hacker era’ of digital history. Now that consumers and traditional media understand the digital world, maybe there’s proportionally less need for freewheeling technological experimentation and platforms that allow for the same. Maybe the hypothetical mom doesn’t need a real computer. As long as real computers stick around for people who do need them, maybe there’s no harm in that.”

“For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home.”

“When the first iPod came out, its goal was not to grab the customers who Creative and Archos were fighting over, with their dueling 6GB ‘jukeboxes.’ It was to grab everyone else. I remember listening to arguments about why Archos had a better device than Creative or even Apple. Lot of good that early-adopter love got them in the long run. The pocket media player market exploded, with Apple eating over half the pie consistently for almost a decade.”

“When the iPhone came out, BlackBerry users were like, ‘No flippin’ way.’ And guess what, those people still buy BlackBerries. The point is, the iPhone wasn’t designed to win the hearts and minds of people who already knew their way around a smartphone. It came to convince people walking around with Samsung and LG flip phones that there was more to life. And it worked.”

I’ve made similar analogies to the development of automobiles that Gruber is making in his iPad thoughts post. But in my case its a general analogy about things getting easier to use and more reliable, with less of a reliance on mechanics to make purchasing decisions. Gruber’s missing the main difference between autos and computers: software. What he’s describing is a world where there is no customized software. And by “customized” I mean software like Nisus, or Acorn, or Pixelmator. Any complex software not made by Apple.

The analogy to cars fails because cars are hardware. They can’t be a truck when you need hauling, a subcompact when you need to park, an SUV when it’s time to haul the kids around, and a Cessna when you need to get to Dayton tonight. Computers can. A computer can let you play a simple game in one minute and save your business in the next—if the software is available.¹ In today’s world, the software is always available, if you’re willing to pay the price. In a world of app stores, you have to live in the underground world of unlocked computers, furtively applying upgrades in the dark.

Automobiles never went through a transition where Ford made vehicles we could change from compact to pickup and then they decided to take away that advantage. This is a feature of software. The advantage of software is that we don’t have to rely on Apple/Ford to approve new uses for that thing we bought. Everyone benefits when programmers can program.

The analogy would be an inability to add a bike rack or a trailer hitch or a child seat to your Taurus without going through the Ford PonyStore. The only way to replace your tires is to send it back to the dealership. Don’t even think about getting a better radio. That duplicates existing functionality and will not be approved!

You bet the carmakers would love to require everything new go through their own dealers. And that world would suck.

Most people want something custom for their computers whether it’s spider solitaire, a geneology manager, or a writer-centric word processor. And there will undoubtedly be more complex software for the iPad than there is for the iPhone. But it won’t be as good as it could be. The three-week to three-month approval time drastically depresses the feedback loop for improving software.

While I would never buy an iPod Touch, I do enjoy having one. But I enjoy it because it’s an appendage to my real computer and it makes my real computer more useful. It’s a remote control for my music; it’s a way of synchronizing notes; and its a way of keeping my browser bookmarks, address book, passwords, and so on, with me at all times. But it’s useless without that real computer that other people can program without having to get approval from Apple. Sure, the iPod Touch plays nice games. But I’m not going to carry it with me at all times because it plays nice games.

iPad Image Courtesy of Apple

The iPad is definitely cool. If Nisus were to come out for it and run well in the 16GB version, I’d be tempted. But the iPad really throws the major flaw of the iPod Touch into the limelight: no ability to write quick scripts. You might think, hey, I’m not a programmer, why should I care? But the things you do use are written by programmers. And many times, at least in education, important things are written on-the-spot. You’re in the field (medical, military, business, educational) and you need something you’d normally write yourself or have your right-hand-tech-assistant whip up. With the app store model, you wait months even for things that should be a quick script.

But the iPad does seem to make the Kindle worthless. At $500 for a multi-purpose computer vs. $260 for a dedicated book reader with a little web on the side, there doesn’t appear to be much of a competition. You’re going to have an iPad anyway for other things; what’s the point of buying a Kindle?

But the Kindle isn’t the only thing the iPad competes with. This is a laptop. It’s not something for just sticking in your sidebag like an iPod Touch. This is a competitor to the MacBook line. If I buy this, I don’t buy a Macbook.

Oddly, it contains a compass but not GPS. The 3GS version contains “assisted GPS” but, as far as I can tell from the specs, it doesn’t contain a real GPS. It will only work when in range of a cell tower or, possibly, a known wi-fi hotspot. Will it work on a 3GS-equipped iPad without a data plan? Is standalone GPS really that expensive?

If the ePub format they’re using is standard ePub, that’s great. It’s like mp3 for books but even more open.

And… like the iPod/iPhone, this is another device that doesn’t run Windows. And that uses the Macintosh development environment. Any Windows software author who makes a version of their app for the iPad has done most of the work of making a version of their app for Mac OS X.

The worst thing for me is that nobody is competing with Apple right now. This lets them do things like leave out cameras and GPS on the iPod Touch/iPad. This is what lets them lock it down. The only thing that comes even close is Google’s Android, and only Google seems to understand what it means. For all that people complain about the supposed “Apple tax” I don’t see anything competing with the iPod Touch, and what, really, is in the iPad that someone couldn’t have come out with yesterday? Does nobody else care about design and usability?

My new iMac arrived on Tuesday. It has a real magnetic personality! The glass covers of the new iMacs are held on by strong magnets on the sides and top. That ought to be useful for something, but nowadays few things are the right kind of metal. No line of quarters like an old arcade: none of the coins I tried to line the sides with stuck. Even my forks and spoons wouldn’t stick. I had to dig deep in the silverware drawer to find some old forks that still had enough metal of the type attracted to magnets.

It is monstrously impressive at first sight. The 27-inch screen means it’s in a very large box. It was surprisingly light; when I picked it up I could have sworn it didn’t weigh any more than the 20-inch iMac I bought over four years ago. (In fact, it weighs only 5.3 pounds more, according to Apple’s technical specifications.)

And it’s fast. The main reason I got it was to improve the speed of my custom Django CMS. A rough test of rendering a particularly complex page for upload: 25 seconds on the iMac G5 2GHz vs. 5 seconds on the iMac Core i7 2.8GHz¹. Publishing is a lot faster now.

So far, knock on wood, etc., it’s been a nice Christmas present to myself.

I did, of course, run into some issues, and I’m wondering about replacing a handful of very useful PowerPC-only applications.

Migration Assistant takes forever

Migration Assistant kind of sucks. I set it up to import my data, and at first it said 10 hours. And it kept rising, until, after about an hour, it was going to take another 28 hours to finish. I finally cancelled and copied everything by hand—it only took two hours, and I had better control.

Migration Assistant also appears to be fragile. Quitting seems to necessitate a restart of the computer.

Reusing Time Machine backups

Time Machine has become more than just a backup program. It’s an integral part of how I work, a fourth dimension in file management. I use it to compare changes all the time, and just the knowledge that it’s there and a click away is extremely helpful. So I very much did not want to start over with the new computer. I wanted to use the old computer’s Time Machine backup as a starting point for the new one’s. A quick search indicated that Snow Leopard handles this automatically, but for me, it didn’t. Even if I renamed the computer to be the same as the old one, Snow Leopard wouldn’t ask if I wanted to re-use it.

Yes, when you’ve been looking at the world through a health reform lens, everything looks like the health takeover:

“By making airport Wi-Fi free for everyone, and apparently not upping capacity, Google has essentially crippled access for everyone instead. No one is getting a good connection. If Google weren’t sponsoring the Wi-Fi access, fewer would be using it and performance would be better. People who are ready to pay for decent Internet access while waiting for their flight, like our colleagues, can’t.”